Great project for that area. I know that side of Ridgedale has a ton of parking and never busy. It would be a great addition with another apartment project proposed across the street on the old Redstone site. Rosedale is running out of room with a new Von Maur, and a proposed Portillo's potentially getting built in the mall parking lot.

The city was very favorable toward the project, having approved it back in 2015. (Nextdoor concerns, however, were panicked over an imminent crime wave ... not joking)

Construction looks to break ground this June or July, I guess because we’ve built a system that makes affordable housing take years to start up while market rate gets fast track status?

Minnetonka elected officials sound kinda upset about losing this. Maybe they need to come up with a local solution to help developers in their city build what the elected officials and city staff want? A solution doesn’t make projects tenuous because it drags out for years to make happen?

I don’t know, would you call that transit oriented development, being literally next to a transit stop?

6 stories for the senior housing is decent; 4 stories for the workforce housing seems borderline. Who is going to complain about height here?

And while only 1/4 parking spot per unit seems great, the parking lot still feels like the front yard for each unit. Why not coalesce all the parking into a rectangular lot outside the buildings, and reduce the footprint of the existing buildings by making them taller. Then, someday, the parking lot can be built over with another apartment building, optionally with parking underground (if we even need it by then).

And why no retail next to the transit station? This feels very suburban, not TOD. Not even suburban-TOD. If your city gets a transit stop on a billion dollar transit line, it’s imperative that you build the max density possible adjacent to it, to let as many residents as possible *walk* to transit.

Of course I’m basing this all on that one image. Maybe there’s more to this?

It absolutely is a wasted opportunity to not make this multi use. But this is a very short two block walk to two retail areas over on Shady Oak Rd.

It will finished 2 years before SWLRT, so this has to plan for lots of car occupancy, probably why the non-senior units are stuck at 4 stories, too many more and car storage become expansive to put places.

This is solving a need to get lots of housing near jobs. Maybe Minnetonka can insist the ground floor units nearest the station be built to be easily converted to future retail?

Gist:
Newport Midwest received city approvals Monday night to build 196 market-rate apartments and 55 affordable apartments that will be just 600 yards from front door to the planned Opus Station in Minnetonka. That project will break ground this spring.
That project, called The Mariner, will be completed well in advance of when the $2 billion light rail line begins service in 2023.

Ditto for Plymouth-based Dominium’s 488-unit affordable housing development, which will break ground in early December on the other side of Opus Station. “We’ve certainly been paying attention to what has happened, and [LRT] was an attractive piece to buying the land,” said Ryan Lunderby, Dominium vice president and project partner. “But we did make a commitment to the city that we would move forward on the project with or without LRT. There is so much demand for affordable housing in that location.”

So, if I'm reading this correctly, there's going to be about 1,000 new units of housing within a half-mile of the Opus Station on opening day. That's pretty impressive. (Newport has 251, Dominium has 488, and RiZE has 322 for a total of 1,061.)